he public alike had begun to use the secretary's
office as a clearinghouse for reconciling conflicting demands of the
services, as an appellate court reviewing decisions of the service
secretaries, and as the natural channel of communication between the
services and the White House, Congress, and the public. Many racial
problems had become interservice in nature, and only the Office of the
Secretary of Defense possessed the administrative machinery to deal
with such matters. The Personnel Policy Board or, later, the new
Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower and
Personnel might well have become the watchdog recommended by the Fahy
Committee to oversee the services' progress toward integration, but
neither did.

Certainly the Secretary of Defense had other matters pressing for his
attention. Secretary Johnson had become the central character in the
budgetary conflicts of Truman's second term, and both he and General
George C. Marshall, who succeeded him as secretary on 20 September
1950, were suddenly thrust into leadership of the Korean War. In
administrative matters, at least, Marshall had to concentrate on
boosting the morale of a department torn by internecine budgetary
arguments. Integration did not appear to have the same importance to
national security as these weighty matters. More to the point, Johnson
and Marshall were not social reformers. Whatever their personal
attitudes, they were content to let the services set the pace of
racial reform. With one notable exception neither man initiated any of
the historic racial changes that took place in the armed forces during
the early 1950's.

For the most part those racial issues that did involve the Secretary
of Defense centered on the status of the Negro in the armed forces in
general and were extraneous to the issue of integration. One of the
most persistent status problems was classification by race. First
posed during the great World War II draft calls, the question of how
to determine a serviceman's race, and indeed the related one of who
had the right to make such a determination, remained unanswered five
years later. In August 1944 the Selective Service System decided (p. 381)
that the definition of a man's race should be left to the man himself.
While this solution no doubt pleased racial progressives and certainly
simplified the induction process, not to speak of protecting the War
Department from a ticklish court review, it still left